5 Critical Needs of People in the Workplace
The last year has been painful. We have shape shifted to adapt to what we had hoped would be a short-term experience. Now one year later, with “pandemic fatigue” settling in, more than ever, leaders need to be zoning in how to support their teams through a prolonged period of uncertainty.
As I’ve worked with clients over the years, and especially through the pandemic, one thing I’ve noticed is that leaders who are more self-aware of themselves – their skills, aptitudes, challenges, and emotions – are better equipped to engage and lead through volatile times. Their ability to connect to themselves helps them to connect to their teams and fellow executives.
Leading in such uncertain times requires a leader to dive into understanding five basic needs that humans have in the workplace. Then, they can adapt their own strengths to help their teams and organization feel and move with ease, empathy, agility, and resiliency. More than anything, leadership is relational, contextual, interconnected and intra-connected.
Research on human needs, both personal and at work, is not new. We all probably have been introduced to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at some point in our lives. I’ve adapted information from various studies and books to offer what I believe is most pertinent in the current context where uncertainty is everywhere; the stresses of working at home are exhausting; anxiety prevails from being isolated and grieving all we have lost; and worrying about our health and that of and that of loved ones – it’s all overwhelming. And each one of us is responding differently because we each have very different experiences with various triggers/stressors.
The first need is foundational. Your team needs to trust you. Without trust, it’s fairly difficult to get leverage on any other need. What does trust really look like? For your teams, it means they want someone who is honest, authentic, who will tell them the truth - even when the truth is hard to hear. It’s someone who they can believe in and follow. Someone who has integrity. You might think this is tough to do in a pandemic, but it’s actually what will make you more human in their eyes.
If, as a leader, you are holding on to too much to protect your teams, think about how much trust would be created if you let some stuff go and trusted your teams to do the tasks? To be trusted, you must trust others. Create trust by getting out of people’s way and creating pathways for them to do what needs to be done.
Or if you are a leader who carries the burden of needing to have all the answers or to never show vulnerability, what would happen if you shared with your team that you don’t know and that you too are holding some fear about the next step? Your ability to name what you are thinking and feeling and trusting your teams with sensitive information will ramp up trust in powerful ways. This vulnerability you share with them translates to them trusting you with information that is affecting them and their performance and thus the team’s and the organization’s performance.
In the past year, organizations have had to make some very difficult decisions. Trust played a huge component in how those decisions reverberated throughout the organization. And this brings me to the second need that your teams have – compassion. The word is thrown around a lot and has come to mean different things. At its root, compassion means “to suffer with” – and are we all not suffering together through this pandemic? Compassion is greater than empathy because there’s an active part to it where you want to support people to move through their pain. Compassion is about seeing your team members and colleagues as whole human beings. This is where the team member is asking: Do you truly care about me as a person or am I just someone who gets you the results you want? Do you see I have emotions? Do you see or are you even curious about what else exists in my life and how that lends to overwhelm, exhaustion, or burnout?
During this past year, compassion has played a pivotal role in keeping teams engaged and motivated. I remember one conversation where someone in a leadership position couldn’t understand why her perfunctory question, “How are you doing?” at the beginning of a meeting wasn’t enough for people to understand that she cared. The pandemic, especially with virtual connection, has meant that teams need time and attention to speak to and be with the pivots they have had to make. The emotional connection is vital.
With an emotional connection, the third need, stability, becomes easier to reach. Stability is about feeling grounded in some sense of accomplishment. To feel that you have contributed to making something happen, no matter how large or small. When everything is out of control in our world, people need to feel that they can control something – that they have had some successes. The leader supports stability through recognition, a calming presence, and supporting team members to navigate pathways from confusion to clarity. People need to know what is expected of them and that isn’t as easy as it sounds – much confusion comes from people not being able to make clear requests and fulfil commitments (that’s a whole other blog post!)
The fourth need is hope. As leaders, fulfilling this elusive need can feel daunting or even out of your realm of responsibility. Yet, if fulfilled by you, it’s a need that grounds, enables, and nourishes your people. Especially during trying times, teams want to know that there is a way through the messiness and that positive things are coming in the near and long-term future. Clear intentions and goals inspire people to work beyond their current challenges. By providing hope, you support your people to ‘way find’ to achieve mini and strategic goals – you are helping them to lean into the future. The ripple effects of course create more security, stability, inspiration and collaboration. During a pandemic, I would suggest keeping your lofty vision in site and complementing that with shorter term goals for only two weeks – when the context is changing so quickly, the decision-making needs to reflect that reality.
This leads to the fifth need of belonging. Teams need to see how they fit in the organization – help them understand their role in the hope, how they create hope, and how they deliver hope. They need to feel they are a part of something much bigger than themselves. When teams feel that they are aligning with a vision that they care about alongside people who value similar things as they do, they soar. It’s why visions are supposed to be inspiring – remind yourself and your people about why you do what you do, and how you do it. Belonging is about sharing deep rooted values.
The five needs that I’ve spoken about are certainly not linear, and I hope you see the interconnectedness of all of them. Even delivering on fulfilling one of those needs well will create an upswing in the other four needs. When these needs are touched upon, communicated, and experienced by teams at every meeting, interaction and communication, your people will respond differently because they will have experienced whole human engagement. People will forget content, but they will not forget an experience.
The beauty in fulfilling these team needs is that your people will begin to see you as an expanded human. If you are able to offer nuances of your life that you may have never shared before like how you too are scared sometimes or you too are worried about your son’s education, you will find that you will receive a more authentic response from them the next time you ask them, “How are you feeling today?”.
With all this in mind, I circle back to the beginning of this post where I said leaders who are radically self-aware are leading more efficiently and effectively. Why? Well, it’s the ability to acknowledge what’s happening for you, what emotions you are feeling, how those translate to behaviours, and how those actions affect your colleagues and teams. If you are anxious, do you have strategies for pausing, disconnecting, and then re-connecting from a more grounded place? If not, you will not be the calm that’s needed to provide stability to your teams. Is it in your wheelhouse of strengths to provide hope? If no, then what will help you ramp that up during a time in history when hope is required? Or who can provide that role of providing hope if for some reason it can’t be you? When stress is heightened, as it has been most of the past year, how do you react? What would it take for you to pause and learn to respond from a different place?
Most of us have never lived through a time such as we are living currently. Responding more expansively to the current context is a work in progress – each one of us is a work in progress – always. So, if you haven’t yet, it’s a great time to dive into what your next evolution is so your leadership style embraces what is needed now and more than ever, into the future.
Here are some questions to ask yourself about how you are fulfilling these five basic needs of your people.
1. What am I hearing from my colleagues and teams?
2. What am I doing to support them through this time?
3. How often am I truly connecting with them and communicating with humility and vulnerability? (Do I ever take off my exo-skeleton of executive armor?)
4. What am I doing to ensure I don’t feel like I am an island of one?
5. What am I doing to create space for myself to understand my emotions, ground myself and then respond to teams and situations instead of reacting?
6. What have I done to go beyond saying “How are you?” to understand how my people are feeling?
